Geological Chronicle
Linné is an impact crater situated in western Mare Serenitatis, surrounded by mare plains virtually devoid of other features of interest. The feature spans 2.23 kilometers in diameter and honors the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. Its nearest named neighbor is Banting to the east-southeast.
The Copernican crater has an estimated age of only a few tens of millions of years. Long believed to have a bowl shape, data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showed that it has the shape of a flattened, inverted cone. A blanket of ejecta formed during the original impact surrounds the crater, displaying a relatively high albedo that makes the feature appear bright.
The crater became the center of a prolonged astronomical controversy following nineteenth-century observations. Wilhelm Lohrmann drew Linné as an 8-kilometer crater in his 1824 lunar atlas, and Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler described it as 10 kilometers across in 1837. In 1866, Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt reported that the crater had changed into a mere white patch rather than a deep structure. Because its small size tests the visual perception of Earth-based telescopes, the crater can appear to vanish in poor visibility.